Section 5

5. Now, once Happiness is possible at all to Souls in this
Universe, if some fail of it, the blame must fall not upon the place
but upon the feebleness insufficient to the staunch combat in the
one arena where the rewards of excellence are offered. Men are not
born divine; what wonder that they do not enjoy a divine life. And
poverty and sickness mean nothing to the good- only to the evil are
they disastrous- and where there is body there must be ill health.

Besides, these accidents are not without their service in the
co-ordination and completion of the Universal system.

One thing perishes, and the Kosmic Reason- whose control nothing
anywhere eludes- employs that ending to the beginning of something
new; and, so, when the body suffers and the Soul, under the
affliction, loses power, all that has been bound under illness and
evil is brought into a new set of relations, into another class or
order. Some of these troubles are helpful to the very sufferers-
poverty and sickness, for example- and as for vice, even this brings
something to the general service: it acts as a lesson in right
doing, and, in many ways even, produces good; thus, by setting men
face to face with the ways and consequences of iniquity, it
calls them
from lethargy, stirs the deeper mind and sets the understanding to
work; by the contrast of the evil under which wrong-doers labour it
displays the worth of the right. Not that evil exists for this
purpose; but, as we have indicated, once the wrong has come
to be, the
Reason of the Kosmos employs it to good ends; and, precisely, the
proof of the mightiest power is to be able to use the ignoble nobly
and, given formlessness, to make it the material of unknown forms.

The principle is that evil by definition is a falling short in
good, and good cannot be at full strength in this Sphere where it is
lodged in the alien: the good here is in something else, in
something distinct from the Good, and this something else
constitutes the falling short for it is not good. And this
is why evil
is ineradicable: there is, first, the fact that in relation to this
principle of Good, thing will always stand less than thing, and,
besides, all things come into being through it and are what they are
by standing away from it.